Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy

by Harry Turtledove

  He’d been out on deck under air attack during the Pacific War. It was just as much fun as he remembered. A Confederate airplane went into the sea almost without a splash. Another flew by nearly low enough to land, spraying machine-gun bullets down the flight deck. Men dove for cover, not that there was much. Screams rose when bullets struck home.

  Sam sprinted up the deck toward the bomb hit. He skidded to a stop at the smoking edge of the damage. The explosion had torn off a corner of the flight deck, exposing one of the five-inch gun positions just below. The gun seemed intact. Red smears and spatters said the gunners were anything but. Sam turned to a petty officer—one of the flight-deck crew—beside him. “Can you still take off and land with the deck like this?”

  “Hell, yes, sir,” the man answered. “No problem. It was a glancing hit—should have been a miss, I think, but we zigged instead o’ zagging.” He didn’t seem very worried.

  “All right.” Carsten gave orders to most of the men he commanded to help set things right. Then he said, “Doheny, Eisenberg, Bengough—follow me. We can still fight that gun, God damn it.” He hadn’t been in charge of a five-inch for years, but he knew how.

  He scrambled down through the wreckage to the gun. He cut his hands a couple of times, but he wouldn’t notice till later. A fighter from the carrier’s combat air patrol, flame licking back from the engine cowling toward the eagle with crossed swords on the tail, cartwheeled into the Atlantic. Another Confederate airplane shot up the Remembrance.

  “Doheny, jerk shells. Bengough, you load and shoot. Eisenberg, handle azimuth! Can you do that?” Sam waited for a nod, then grabbed the elevation screw. “Come on, you bastards! Like the skipper said, we’ve got company!”

  At his orders, the gun started banging away. Black puffs of smoke dotted the sky. A Confederate airplane, hit square in the fuselage, broke in two. Both burning chunks went into the drink. The pilot never had a chance to hit the silk. Carsten and his makeshift crew cheered like maniacs. Even as he yelled, though, he was looking for a new target. How many waves of attackers would the Confederates send at the Remembrance? And how long till her own bombers and torpedo airplanes came home and she could get the hell out of range? It already seemed like forever.

  Anne Colleton looked across the warm blue water of Charleston harbor toward Fort Sumter. A plaque said General Beauregard had stood right here when the Confederacy opened fire on the island fortress the United States and that damned fool Abraham Lincoln refused to surrender. FIRST SHOTS IN THE BATTLE FOR OUR FREEDOM FROM YANKEE OPPRESSION, the plaque declared.

  That little island remained fortified to this day. Big coast-defense guns could reach far out to sea. But they couldn’t reach far enough to smash all the threats the United States might throw at Charleston. Antiaircraft guns bristled on the island and around the harbor. If the damnyankees flew airplanes off the deck of a ship at the ships and the shore installations here, they would catch as much hell as the gunners could give them.

  A Freedom Party stalwart named Kirby Walker stood at Anne’s right hand. “If they try anything, we’ll be ready for ’em,” he declared. Despite the heat and breathless humidity of early summer in Charleston, he looked cool and well pressed in crisp white shirt and butternut slacks. “We know—darn well they can’t lick us.”

  He couldn’t have been more than thirty years old. He would have been a little boy when the Great War ended. She wondered how long it would be till this new one put him in a real uniform instead of the imitation he wore. She also wondered if he had any brains at all. Some stalwarts didn’t—they were all balls and fists, and they didn’t need to be anything else. She said, “We don’t know anything of the sort. If they hadn’t licked us the last time, this war would look mighty different.”

  “Well, but we were stabbed in the back then.” Walker sounded as positive as if he’d been there to watch the knife go home. “It’ll be a fair fight this time, so of course we’ll lick ’em.”

  He talked just the way Jake Featherston and Saul Goldman would have wanted him to. He talked just the way the President and his director of communications had been training Confederates to talk ever since Featherston took the oath of office. He thought the way they wanted him to think. He was the new Confederate man, and there were an awful lot just like him.

  Anne, in fact, had come to Charleston to put on a rally for the new Confederate men and their female opposite numbers. When a lot of those men would be going into uniform, and when, in due course, they would start coming back maimed or not coming back at all, they needed to be reminded of what this was all about. Speeches on the wireless went only so far. Nothing like a real rally where you could see your friends and neighbors jumping up and yelling along with you, where you could smell the fellow next to you getting all hot and bothered, to keep the juices flowing.

  A gray-mustached man who walked with a limp and carried a submachine gun led a gang of Negroes towards a merchant ship. The blacks wore dungarees and coarse, collarless cotton work shirts. Their clothes weren’t quite uniforms. They weren’t quite prison garb, either. But they came close on both counts.

  Kirby Walker followed the blacks with his eyes. “Lousy niggers,” he muttered. “We work ’em hard enough, they won’t have a chance to get themselves in any trouble this time around.”

  “Here’s hoping they won’t,” Anne said.

  “If they do, we start shooting first,” Walker said. “We’d’ve shot a few of ’em early on in the last war, we never would’ve had half the trouble with ’em we did. We were too soft, and we paid for it.”

  Again, he sounded as if he’d been there. This time, Anne completely agreed with him. She had been there. The Marshlands plantation, these days, was nothing but ruins. Before the war, she’d treated her Negroes better than anyone else nearby. And what had she got for it? Half—more than half—the leaders of the Red Congaree Socialist Republic came from her plantation.

  She muttered to herself. Not very long before, she’d been sure she found Scipio, her old butler, waiting tables at a restaurant in Augusta, Georgia. He’d been in the Congaree Socialist Republic up to his eyebrows, and he’d managed to stay hidden for more than twenty years after its last vestiges collapsed. She wanted him dead. She’d been so sure she had him, too, till the restaurant showed her paperwork proving the black man she thought was Scipio really was the Xerxes he claimed to be, and that he’d worked there since before the Great War.

  Anne muttered some more. She hated being wrong about anything. She especially hated being wrong about anything that meant so much to her. As far as she knew, that black man was still waiting tables at that restaurant. What would have happened to him if he really were Scipio . . . Her nails bit into the flesh of her palms. How she’d wanted that!

  And she’d been so very certain! Half of her still was, though she couldn’t imagine how that manager might have had faked paperwork that went back close to thirty years handy. Then she shrugged and laughed a singularly unpleasant laugh. Her gaze swung to the Negro work gang, which was hauling crates out of a freighter under the watchful eye of that half-disabled veteran with the submachine gun. Whether the Negro in Augusta really was Scipio or Xerxes, he might yet get his.

  “What’s funny, Miss Colleton?” Kirby Walker asked.

  “What?” Anne blinked, recalled from dreams of vengeance to present reality. “Nothing, really. Just thinking of what might have been.”

  “Not a . . . heck of a lot of point to that, I don’t reckon,” the Freedom Party stalwart said. “You can’t change things now.”

  “No?” Back at the start of the Great War, the glance Anne sent him would have melted him right out of his shoes. Now it only made him shrug stolidly. Her blond good looks hadn’t altogether left her, but they slipped away day by day. She could still hope for vengeance against Scipio and against the United States. Nobody got even with time. She sighed. “I want to have another look at the hall, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure enough, ma’am. I’m
here to do what you need me to do,” Walker said. He made himself a liar without even knowing he was doing it. What she needed him to do was acknowledge her as the beauty she had been. That wouldn’t happen. She knew it wouldn’t, couldn’t. Knowing was an ulcer that ate at her and would not heal.

  It was, perhaps, just as well that Clarence Potter would not know where this rally was being held. The hall had belonged to the Whigs for generations. Clarence had gone to God only knew how many meetings here himself. It wasn’t far from the harbor, and it was right across the street from a bar: a good location. These days, nobody but the Freedom Party held meetings. The hall had stood vacant for quite a while. It wouldn’t stay vacant long. And the Freedom Party, unlike the Whigs, did meetings right.

  Stalwarts and Freedom Party guards and ordinary Party members started filling the place more than an hour before the scheduled meeting time. Everyone wore a Freedom Party pin: the Confederate battle flag with red and blue reversed. Most of the pins had a black border. That showed that the people who wore them had joined the Party after March 4, 1934, when Jake Featherston became President of the CSA. Members who’d belonged before that day looked down their noses at the johnny-come-latelies and opportunists, which didn’t keep them from using the newcomers whenever they needed to.

  A young Congressman named Storm or something like that was the first one up to address the meeting. Anne had heard him before. He was very good on the Negro question, weaker elsewhere. Here, he didn’t get to show his paces. He’d barely started his speech when air-raid sirens outside began to wail.

  “You see?” he shouted. “Do you see?” He shook a fist at the sky. “The damnyankees don’t want you to hear the truth!”

  People laughed and cheered. “Go on!” somebody shouted. “Who cares about a damned air raid?”

  And the Congressman did go on, even when the antiaircraft guns around the harbor started pounding and bombs started falling. The Freedom Party men in the audience clapped their hands and stomped their feet to try to drown out the din of war. That made the Congressman shout to be heard over them and over the fireworks not far away.

  Anne thought they were all insane. She’d been through a bombing raid in the last war. Sitting here in this exposed place was the last thing she wanted to do now. But she knew what would happen if she yelled, Take cover, you damned idiots! The Freedom Party stalwarts would think she was nothing but a cowardly, panicky woman. They wouldn’t listen to her. And they wouldn’t take her seriously any more afterwards, either. That was the biggest part of what kept her quiet.

  Resentment burned in her all the same. Because you’re so stinking stubborn, I’m liable to get killed.

  More bombs burst. Windows rattled. Not all the Yankees’ presents were falling right on the harbor. Maybe that meant the antiaircraft fire was heavier than the enemy had expected. Maybe it meant his bombardiers didn’t know their business. Either way, it meant more of Charleston was catching hell.

  Finally, a man about her age whose Party pin showed he’d been a member before 1934 and who wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart just below it, stood up and bellowed, “Time to get the hell out of here, folks, while the getting’s good!”

  They listened to him. Anne saw that with a mixture of relief and resentment. The veteran had a deep, authoritative rasp in his voice. Would they have paid that kind of attention to her contralto? Not likely!

  “Where’s a shelter?” somebody called. “This goddamn building hasn’t got a cellar.”

  “Across the street,” someone else said. He sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. People got up and started leaving. Anne wasn’t sorry to go—far from it. She had all she could do not to run for the door. Again, fear of being thought weak carried more weight than fear of death. She didn’t know why that should be so, but it was.

  Out in the street, the noise was ten times worse. Chunks of shrapnel from spent antiaircraft shells rained down out of the sky. A man cried out in pain when one hit him in the shoulder. He sat down, hard, right there in the middle of the road.

  Anne looked around for the U.S. airplanes that were causing all the commotion. She didn’t see any—and then she did. Here came one, over the tops of the buildings, straight toward her. It was on fire, and still had a bomb slung below the fuselage. Maybe the pilot was dead. If he wasn’t, he couldn’t do anything with or to his airplane.

  “Run!” Half a dozen people yelled it. It was good advice, but much too late. The bomber screamed down. The world blew up.

  When Anne came back to consciousness, she wished she hadn’t. She’d heard you often didn’t feel pain when you were badly wounded. Whoever had said that was a goddamn liar. Someone very close by was screaming. She needed a little while to realize those noises were pouring out of her own mouth. She tried to stop, and couldn’t.

  Kirby Walker lay a few feet away, gutted like a hog. He was lucky. He was already dead. Anne looked down at herself, and wished she hadn’t. Consciousness faded. Black rose up to swallow it.

  II

  Somewhere down below Major Jonathan Moss was Ohio, somewhere Kentucky. He saw the ribbon of the Ohio River, but could not for the life of him have said which side of it he was on, not just then. He’d just broken off a dogfight with a Confederate fighter pilot who’d run into a cloud to get away from him, and he didn’t know north from his elbow.

  Then he saw shells bursting on the ground, and he realized that had to be Ohio. The CSA had kicked the USA in the teeth, attacking without bothering to declare war first. The Confederates had the edge right now. They were across the river in Indiana and Ohio, across with infantry and artillery and barrels, and they were pushing forward with everything they had.

  No Great War army had ever moved like this. Moss knew that from experience. Going from Niagara Falls to Toronto had taken three long, bloody years. The Canadians had defended every foot of ground as if they were holding Satan’s demons out of heaven. And, with trenches and machine guns, they’d been able to make every foot of ground count, too. Moss had started out flying a Curtiss pusher biplane, observing the front from above. He’d imagined himself a knight of the air. He’d ended up an ace in a fighting scout, knowing full well that his hands were no cleaner than any ground-pounding foot slogger’s.

  Living conditions were better for fliers, though. He hadn’t got muddy. He’d had his own cot in a barracks hall or tent out of artillery range of the front. He’d eaten regularly, and well. And people with unpleasant attitudes had tried to kill him only every once in a while, not all the time.

  So here he was back again for another round, something he never would have imagined when the Great War ended. He’d spent a lot of years as a lawyer specializing in occupation law in Canada. He’d married a Canadian woman. They’d had a little girl. And a Canadian bomb-maker had blown them up, maybe under the delusion that that would somehow help Canada toward freedom. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t. It hadn’t. All it had done was wreck his life and drive him back to flying fighters.

  He pushed the stick forward. The Wright 27 dove. The ground swelled. So did the Confederate soldiers and barrels in front of Lebanon, Ohio—he thought it was Lebanon, anyway, and if he was wrong, he was wrong. He wasn’t wrong about the advancing Confederates. Thanks to the barrels, they’d already smashed through trench lines that would have held up a Great War army for weeks, and the war was only a couple of days old.

  Someone down there spotted him. A machine gun started winking. Tracers flashed past his wings. He jabbed his thumb down on the firing button on top of the stick. His own machine guns spat death through the spinning disk of his propeller. Soldiers on the ground ran or threw themselves flat. That damned machine gun suddenly stopped shooting. Moss whooped.

  Here and there, Confederates with rifles took potshots at him. Those didn’t worry him. If a rifle bullet knocked down a fighter, the pilot’s number was surely up. He checked six as he climbed. No Confederate on his tail. In the first clash, the CSA’s machines—they were calling them
Hound Dogs—seemed more maneuverable, but U.S. fighters had the edge diving and climbing. Neither held any enormous advantage over the other.

  The Confederates had some real antiaircraft guns down there. Puffs of black smoke appeared in midair not far from Moss’ fighter. They weren’t quite round; they were longer from top to bottom than side to side. “Nigger-baby flak,” Moss muttered to himself. With extensions of gas out from the main burst that could have been arms and legs, the smoke patterns did bear a certain resemblance to naked black dolls.

  A bang said a shell fragment had hit the fighter somewhere. Moss’ eyes flicked anxiously from one gauge to another. No loss of oil pressure. No loss of coolant. No fuel leak. No fire. The controls answered—no cut wires or bad hydraulics. He breathed a sigh of relief. No damage done.

  Trouble was, he hadn’t done the Confederates on the ground much harm, either. They would keep right on pushing forward. They weren’t trying to break into Lebanon, which looked to be heavily fortified. They were doing their best to get past it and keep pushing north. If it still had some U.S. soldiers in it afterwards . . . well, so what?

  Neither side had fought that way during the Great War. Neither side could have. That had mostly been a war of shoeleather, with railroads hauling soldiers up to the front and with trucks lugging supplies. But no army then had moved faster than at a walk.

  Things looked different here. Barrels were a lot faster than they had been a generation earlier. Trucks didn’t just haul beans and bullets. They brought soldiers forward to keep up with the barrels. The internal-combustion engine was supercharging this war.

  His fighter’s internal-combustion engine was running out of gas. He streaked north to find another airstrip where he could refuel. He’d started the war in southern Illinois, but they’d sent him farther east right away. For the time being, the action was hottest along the central part of the Ohio River.